Primitive Manners and Customs

by James Anson Farrer

THE BASUTO STORY.

Two brothers, having gone in different directions to make their fortunes, met again, after sundry adventures, the elder enriched by a pack of dogs, the younger by a large number of cows. The younger offered his brother as many of these cows as he pleased, with the exception of a certain white one. This he would not part with; so as they went home, and the younger brother was drinking from a pool, Macilo, the elder, seized his brother’s head and held it under the water till he was dead. Then he buried the body, and covered it with a stone, and proceeded to drive back the whole flock as his own. He had not, however, gone far, before a small bird perched itself on the horn of the white cow and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Twice did Macilo kill the bird with a stone, but each time it reappeared and uttered the same words. So the third time he killed it he burnt it, and threw its ashes to the winds. Then proudly he entered his village, and when they all enquired for his brother, he said that they had taken different roads, and that he was ignorant where he was. The white cow was greatly admired, but suddenly a small bird perched itself on its horns and exclaimed: ‘Macilo has killed Maciloniane for the sake of the white cow he coveted.’ Thus, through a bird into which the heart of the murdered man had been transformed, did the truth become known, and everyone departed with horror from the presence of the murderer.[366]

European folk-lore accounts for the redness of the robin’s breast, either by the theory that he extracted a thorn from the thorn-crown of Christ, or by the theory that he daily bears a drop of water to quench the flames of hell. For either reason he might be justly called the friend of man; but for the bird’s friendliness the Chippewya Indians give a more poetical explanation than either of the above. There was once, they say, a hunter so ambitious that his only son should signalise himself by endurance, when he came to the time of life to undergo the fast preparatory to his choosing his guardian spirit, that after the lad had fasted for eight days, his father still pressed him to persevere. But next day, when the father entered the hut, his son had paid the penalty of violated nature, and in the form of a robin had just flown to the top of the lodge. There, before he flew away to the woods, he entreated his father not to mourn his transformation. ‘I shall be happier,’ he said, ‘in my present state than I could have been as a man. I shall always be the friend of men and keep near their dwellings; I could not gratify your pride as a warrior, but I will cheer you by my songs.... I am now free from cares and pains, my food is furnished by the fields and mountains, and my path is in the bright air.’[367]

Not less poetical is the Hervey Islanders’ account of the origin of some peculiarities among fishes, and notably of the well-known conformation of the head of the common sole. They relate how Ina, leaving the house of her rich parents because she had been beaten and scolded for suffering the arch-thief, Nyana, to steal certain treasures left in her charge, resolved to make her way to the sea beach, and from thence to the Sacred Isle that lay across the sea at the place where the sun set. Arrived at the shore, she first asked the small fish, the avini, to bear her across the sea; but the avini, unable to support her weight, soon let her fall into the water, for which Ina in her anger struck it repeatedly with her foot, thereby causing those beautiful stripes on its sides which are called to this day ‘Ina’s tattooing.’ Trying next the paoro, and meeting with the same mischance, she caused it in the same way to bear ever after those blue marks which are now its glory; and it is said to be historically true that tattooing on that island ‘was simply an imitation of the stripes on the avini and the paoro.’ Then the api, a white fish, incurring the same displeasure, became at once and for ever of an intensely black hue. The sole, indeed, carried Ina farther than the others, but no farther than the breakers by the reef; and Ina, now wild with rage, stamped with such fury on its head that its underneath eye was removed to the upper side, and thus it was condemned ever afterwards to swim flatwise, unlike other fish, because one side of its face had no eye. How Ina then caused a protuberance on the forehead of all sharks, known to this day as Ina’s bump, by cracking a cocoa-nut she wished to drink out of on the forehead of a shark that bore her, how the shark then left her, and how she finally reached the Sacred Isle on the back of the king of sharks, and became the wife of Timirau, the king of all fish, may be read in further detail in Mr. Gill’s interesting collection of Myths and Songs from the South Pacific.[368]

The necessity for a reason for everything, exemplified in these traditions, exercises its influence on mythology itself, reasons being invented for inexplicable customs or beliefs just as they are for strange phenomena in nature. The custom, for instance, of hunting a wren to death once a year, which has been observed in Ireland, the isle of Man, and the South of France, has for its general explanation a belief that the wren is a fairy who, after having decoyed many men to meet their deaths in the sea, took the form of a wren to escape the plot laid for her by a certain knight-errant. But the Irish have found quite another reason for the custom, having invented the story, that on the eve of the battle of the Boyne the Irish had stolen up to King William’s sleeping camp and were on the point of putting an end to the heretics, when a wren hopped upon the drum of a Protestant drummer, and by thus waking him caused their defeat; a defeat which they avenge on every anniversary of the day by the persecution of that unhappy bird.[369]

The story of the wren is well known; how, when the birds were competing for the kingship by the test of the greatest height attained in flying, the wren hid in the eagle’s feathers, and, when the eagle had flown far beyond the other birds, darted himself yet a little above it. It is said that the first appearance of this story is in a collection of beast-fables, composed by a rabbi in the 13th century.[370] But the resemblance between the wren-story as it is told in Germany or Ireland, and a story of a linnet as told by the Odjibwas of North America, is so striking a testimony of the way in which closely similar tales are framed independently, that the two stories are worth comparing.

THE ODJIBWA STORY.

‘The birds met together one day to try which could fly the highest. Some flew up very swift, but soon got tired, and were passed by others of stronger wing. But the eagle went up beyond them all, and was ready to claim the victory, when the grey linnet, a very small bird, flew from the eagle’s back, where it had perched unperceived, and being fresh and unexhausted, succeeded in going the highest. When the birds came down and met in council to award the prize, it was given to the eagle, because that bird had not only gone up nearer to the sun than any of the larger birds, but it had carried the linnet on its back.’

For this reason the eagle’s feathers became the most honourable marks of distinction a man could bear.[371]